What's a good Slackware or Slackware variant distribution?

If I want to load Slackware on an old machine without a lot of memory and with no Internet connectivity, what's a good Slackware variant distribution or what's a good method using Slackware itself to do this? I'd like to be able to just load the distribution on my hard drive by booting a CD or DVD and installing from there. Thanks.

Are there any other projects similar to Vector Linux Light that are based on Slackware? The operating system seems nice, but I was very uncomfortable with the community that develops and uses it as a whole overall. Unfortunately, with Linux, the user community can greatly influence what distribution you're satisfied with.
Any other Slackware variant suggestions or is there an easy way to install Slackware directly from a DVD? Any instructions on how to do so?
I don't need any suggestions on desktop environments/windows managers at this time. I'm perfectly happy with fluxbox or if unavailable, openbox is good too. Both seem to run much better on my machine with very limited memory than any other options. I know what applications to run that will work on a low memory machine. I've done a lot of research on that subject. I just need a good distribution to install that will load with a very limited amount of RAM. Thanks.

puppy linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/official-releasesit will uses slackware tgz package you just type tgz2pet and the package and it turns it into a pet then install it it will tell you the dependencies plus it has it own package manager like all the big boys and loads dependency. it weighs in at 100 mb extremely fast and if you like flux box then you will love puppy great gui interface jwm and icwm

It really saddens me that some one did not think puppy Linux was not a Slackware based system. If you would have looked deeper you would have seen that one of the pups was a complete Slackware build. 3.xx or something.
Look at the scripts and you will see that puppy has taken it's own life direction now days. .
More and more you look at it you wil see the base is a simple layout.
Any way since everyone may think puppy is not slackbased then why even use it.
KISS It just works.
so install pkgtool and and go to slackbuilds and use all the 12.2 you want. build the tgz. and turn them to pets.
you can do his on alot of systems but puppy really likes it.

Slackware 12.2 and use xfce4 this will allow you to have a fast machine. If you are running only say 160 mb ram I would go with puppy Linux 4.12. but if your machine is 1000mhz and 500 ram slackware 12.2 is good. any thing under that any slackware with out using kde desktop is very fast and stable.

I agree. I run two different distributions, Xubuntu and Slackware. Both using xfce. Xfce is very responsive and runs great on older hardware. KDE and Gnome are okay if you have lots of extra RAM and a faster processor. These are not an option on my Thinkpad X30 and T41.

I agree; XFCE4 may do the job just fine. As I indicated in another post, though, Vector just released a "Light" edition of Version 6 that is even lighter than Slackware 12.2, and it may be somewhat more current since it was just released. Take a look at both.

I have to second the Puppy Linux option. I've been using it for 2 years and love it. It's designed to run on older hardware. It brought life back to my aging Thinkpad X30 laptop. They just released version 4.2 a couple of weeks ago.

Thanks for the suggestion on Puppy. I might give it a try. However, I really wanted a distro based on Slackware that would run in really low memory. On reading the Puppy web site, Puppy is not based on Slackware even though some versions supply all the libraries so that you can run slackware binary files. Another interesting thing I read about was the Woof project. It can use various distributions as a base including Slackware, Debian, etc. and create a Puppy style distro for you. However, these types of things are meant to run as Live CDs, which means it takes more RAM than a low memory machine is likely to have.
Any other Slackware variant suggestions for machines with very low memory would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

HI!
You might like to try Mepis. It is especially good for older machines, as
well as the newest ones. It is also good at setting up wireless, should you
use a wireless laptop. Look into www.distrowatch.org?? or com?.
Cheers!

SimplyMEPIS is not part of the Slackware family, it is an easy to use distribution that is part of the greater Debian family. It really is a great distribution, one of the lighter KDE variants you are likely to find, but it is NOT Slackware or a Slackware derivative.
If you are willing to look at non Slackware derivatives, SimplyMEPIS is a good choice for an easy system, but it may not be small enough. If you want smaller and are willing to look outside of Slackware, I would recommend another MEPIS derivative, antiX, which has the same excellent hardware detection found in SimplyMEPIS, but it uses lighter application components, so it is more likely to work on resource constrained hardware.
If you really want or need Slackware, why not Slackware itself? Slackware, by default, installs KDE, if you install the full kit (such as the latest 12.2 release) but it does not start KDE by default. Therefore you can easily replace KDE with something else. How about installing Slackware and using fvwm, IceWM, or Fluxbox as a window manager instead of using a desktop manager? If you want light, that ought to do it. IF you DO want a desktop manager, you can install XFCE, but if that is too heavy, you can opt for LXDE, which is lighter, or perhaps Enlightenment.
With fvwm, IceWM, or Fluxbox as window manager alternatives or XFCE or LXDE as desktop environment alternatives, perhaps the stock Slackware, customized to suit your needs, will be the best suited to you. It is possible to set up any one (or more than one of them) simply through judicious use of the package management tools provided in Slackware.

In addition to Vector Linux, Zenwalk Linux and Absolute Linux offer fast, light environments that may be suitable alternatives to Slackware. However, I just posed the question in my longer note - Why not use Slackware, if that is what you want, and simply replace heavy components with lighter ones? That is essentially what these derivative distributions do. But by doing it yourself, you learn, plus you can make it precisely the way that you want it. Something to consider; it's not all that difficult, once you learn the techniques, and there are plenty of on line forums to help you, including this one and Linux Questions, where there are plenty of Slackware enthusiasts available.

Agreed. I'm running the latest Slackware release with xfce. No KDE or Gnome and it's running great on my aging Thinkpad X30. On the X30, I swap back and forth between Slackware and Puppy. Both fun just fine.

How "limited" is the memory, and for that matter, the CPU, on the system where this is intended to be used? I just did an informal memory usage study, both on a relatively current system (first), then suspected that even a full desktop environment would still run on a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop, a Pentium 3 based system with a CPU rated near 1 GHz and 256 MB memory. I found that both KDE 3.5.10 and KDE 4.2.2 would still run on that aged system!
Using XFCE, LXDE, IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, or fvwm, the performance was completely acceptable, and it was not terrible with KDE either.
Regarding Puppy, there definitely have been some releases in the past that have used Slackware based packages, but Puppy itself is not generally regarded as a Slackware based system, at least not in the sense that Absolute Linux, SLAX, Vector Linux, and Zenwalk are, each of which are directly or indirectly derived from recent Slackware releases. Puppy is, nevertheless, a very lightweight and useful distribution that can utilize Slackware packages, particularly the releases that specifically used the common Slackware .tgz packaging conventions.
What are the basic specifications of the system where this software would be used? Does it have less than 256 MB of memory? Less than that would definitely eliminate a full desktop environment. Availability of 128 MB of RAM or less would further limit its use.
Slackware itself is definitely flexible enough to scale up or down with the capabilities of the hardware, as long as you use software that matches the capabilities of the system.

I'm looking into trying to run something useful on a 64 MB RAM machine. Consider something around the level of a 9 or 10 year old laptop. Am trying to save some old hardware and find uses for it again. Have no need for a server though, so it'll still have to run desktop applications.
My thought is that if you run light-weight applications and not a full scale desktop environment (probably something more like Openbox or LXDE, Fluxbox, or DWM), you could probably still have a useable system. Some of the FLTK, Fox Toolkit or GTK based GUI apps seem to give a decent enough performance to use on older machines, so applications don't all have to be command line to work on older systems.
Might make a nice project for schools or other groups that can't always afford new machines to use a Linux operating system with some lightweight applications. I tried to look up the RULE project which seems to have similar ideas, but they've switching to using a Ubuntu variant (within higher minimum memory requirements) and lightweight applications. Am surprised no one's looking into using a more efficient version of Linux (like Slackware) for a project like that. There are still a lot of old machines and laptops out there that run 64 MB and are far slower than 1 GHz for processing. Our local user group recently collected a large number of them.

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